I’m very interested in farming gold, to buy stuff from the BMAH and to buy WoW token for my gametime. So I joined a professional goldmaking discord in SL to improve myself. But what I experienced there is partly total madness and manipulation of market and prices.
I suppose their are not that many people as deep into that topic as I am now so I need to explain some things to point out what’s going wrong. Sorry for the following wall of text 
I’ve talked to some people now in that specific discord. Many do really any kind of stuff you can imagine from transmog to current profession stuff and they do it on multiple servers. Especially those people don’t want to have any competition. They use several tricks and are also very active on the auction house, to controll it they way they wan’t.
How do they control the market?
So first of all these people have so much gold, a normal player couldn’t imagine. We’re talking about billions here. So if you annoy them by beeing as active as they are on the auction house, they just dump the prizes either to force you into zero win or negative business or to buy off your stuff and sell it later for higher prizes. Or they just cancel as often as possible .So that you never sell someting and just dump the price yourself because you just want to get rid of the stuff finally. Furthermore they buy all of one product. Let’s take flasks or ores for example, to reset prices. It’s a common tactic to buy all ores herbs etc. before a bigger patch comes out. If normal people then just want to go and buy some stuff for their legendarys or flasks, the materials are often more expensive then the product at the end. So they can sell their product under material prices because they bought them much cheaper as they are after the reset. And in the end there’s the baiting stuff, lets say you put one ore for 1 gold which normally would cost 20g or more. Then a player with less AH experience or just imprudence comes and places some hundred ores for 1 gold. Now the baiter can buy them all to sell them later. It also works the other direction to put one ore for an abnormal amount of gold and someone not paying atention who buys multiple ores buying that expensive one accidently.
How can they control so many different products?
Most of them bypass the new auction house throttle for cancel scans etc. just by having multiple accounts only for starting and canceling auctions. I would suggest make using the AH only work on 1 account the same way pet battle is working. No one needs to have 5 accounts at the same time on the auction house perma canceling and auctioning.
Where do they get all the stuff to sell?
First thing is professions, there are a lot of profitable things you can craft and actually earn a lot of money in the AH. Be sure that all those things that make you easy money by just buying materials and crafting are controlled by any of these players i mentioned. Another way to get stuff to sell, are server transfers. They just transfer on a server were stuff is usually cheap and fill a whole guild bank with everything they can snipe including some TCG mounts and pets and other stuff and then transfer this full guild bank to another server and sell everything there over time.
How can they cancel and start auctions so fast, do they use bots?
No most of them don’t, (even if there are a lot of AH bots too, making the situation worse) they just use a certain addon called TSM (trade skill master) which makes auctioning so much easier. In the auction house this addon is a big advantage towards players that don’t have it. I use it myself because you can’t cancel fast enough without it and won’t sell much especially if we’re talking about things like legendaries. When there’s a new patch and you try to sell legendaries and you put them into the AH it won’t take more then 10 seconds until at least one person has undercuted. Most of the time it will be more then 1 person if you are on a high pop server.
What is the problem with this developement?
The first and most obvious thing is that no one needs this amount of gold. So there’s a lot of RMT going out from this players. I reported some in the past, which i was very sure they are doing it and they got banned. But some are really smart, transfering the gold in smaller sums trough multiple accounts and guild banks, so its hard to prove and catch them. Furthermore they control prices the way they want them and keep some products high even if they are not rare. Normal players that don’t wan’t to stay the whole day in front of the AH have low chances on making profitable sells, because they got undercut in seconds. People getting scamed with or without noticing by bait and dump tactics. I also think this whole situation is downgraded more and more. At the start of SL you were only undercutet in seconds with current stuff, now you also see people undercutting things like transmog items, which are no top seller in a few minutes.
What are my suggestions to improve the situation?
Like I said earlier block auction house usage for multiple accounts on the same bnet. Do people really have to take full guild banks + full personal bank with materials and stuff when they transfer a guild? I dont think that most normal guilds, that transfer have every slot filled with stuff. I know it may be difficult but to avoid baiting and also resetting the market you could make the AH work in a way like that: You can’t undercut or overbid by a certain amount. This could be meassured by average region prices of the last week or 2 weeks for example.